tempest in a teacup

The Beijing Olympics have been going on for about a week. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a sports fan, but I have been keeping track of the big news from the event, like the epic 4×100 swimming relay finals, and India’s first solo gold medallist in the history of their participation in the Games (as well as the reaction at home - the railway minister promised to give him a lifetime travel pass for his achievement, which I found rather amusing).

Oh, and of course, there’s the drama. Namely these little tidbits that have been making the rounds.

Windows XP BSOD makes an appearance at the Olympics

Apparently one of the computers that was projecting video onto the stadium walls met with the operating system error of yore. Bad drivers, perhaps.

A girl who performed at the opening ceremony was revealed to have been lipsyncing

And she wasn’t even lipsyncing to her own performance - it was the performance of another girl entirely, one who was deemed insufficiently representative of her home country. And of course…

The victorious Chinese women’s gymnastics team might be underage

The age threshold for taking part is 16 - I’m not sure any of the team members look that old. It certainly fits into my own perspective of the decisions that tend to come out of figures of authority in China and Japan - the focus is not so much on accountability as it is on preserving one’s image, and any blemishes are explained away or quickly hushed in order to save face.

I would express more indignation, but I really don’t care enough to, and on top of that, I suspect that indignation will be in abundant supply thanks to the drones in the mass media. In the meantime, I shall return to amusing myself with the Singapore contingent’s attempts to get a second medal through massive imports of “foreign talent.”

Surely I’m not the only one who thought “is there a version you can wear on your right hand?” after reading about this?

Fear the day when otaku start designing operating system kernels. :P

Finally beat Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition today. Great game overall, with a few things that could be improved (like the repeated boss fight issue I mentioned a while back). It’s off the backlog for now, but I’m definitely going to re-play it with Vergil and on harder difficulties when I get the chance. I stuck mainly to Swordmaster and Gunslinger, too, so I’d like to try out some of the other styles (and weapons) as well.

And at some point I’ll get off my ass and beat the original game as well. For some reason that final Nightmare fight kept kicking my ass.

And of course, I beat the game just in time for my copy of the PC version of Devil May Cry 4 to arrive tomorrow. Woo.

On an unrelated note, I was having some connectivity issues with my desktop last night when I got home from work. I could ping websites just fine, but all other outgoing requests were being blocked. I knew it wasn’t my modem or my router because my laptop (which runs Kubuntu) was able to connect without any problems.

I eventually found out that ZoneAlarm Firewall was blocking all outgoing packets. I shrugged, chalked it up to lousy developers and uninstalled it, restoring connectivity. Nod32 comes with a firewall too, after all.

And then today I read about this, and the fact that I had installed some Microsoft security updates right before leaving for work came to mind.

This line in particular made me laugh:

Mr Rogers said installing it and re-booting his machines fixed all the problems.

He said he could understand Microsoft being reticent with details about the patch given its sensitivity.

“But,” he added “it would seem reasonable for [Microsoft] to test their patch against what is probably the most popular software firewall.”

Of course it’s reasonable. Which is why they probably didn’t do it. :P

So I read this story on Slashdot this morning and reacted the same way any sane techie would: “My god, AVG is a pile of crap. I need to get it off my computer now!” So I did.

Only to have it, with its dying breath, somehow fuck up my Windows registry, preventing Windows from starting at all, except in Safe Mode.

I booted into Safe Mode and used System Restore to bring my computer back to the last point where I could guarantee that it was working. Unfortunately, System Restore also apparently rolls back installed programs. Meaning the copy of Diablo II and its expansion set that I had downloaded and installed from Blizzard’s online store are now gone.

Guess I won’t be playing any TF2 tonight while I download both games all over again :|

For some reason my game directory (with my save data apparently intact, otherwise I really would have lost it) still exists, backed up under another name, but the .exe files and Start Menu entries are nowhere to be found.

I guess AVG wanted to leave me something to remember it by. -_-

Bill Gates and He Who Flings Chairs apparently just gave a brief demo of some of the new features that will be in the successor to Windows Vista.
Click here for a summary at Engadget.

Apparently the biggest two things are that:

1. Microsoft has borrowed the OS X dock (or something similar) for Windows 7 and
2. Multi-touch (based on their upcoming Surface technology) apparently plays a significant role in the OS

That’s right - multi-touch, aka that technology which the iPhone brought to the mainstream last year. A desktop OS driven by multi-touch definitely sounds interesting, but it’ll require dedicated hardware. Still, Surface is probably the most interesting thing that’s come out of Microsoft in a long time, so I’m genuinely curious as to how they’ll integrate it into a standard desktop OS. In addition, I doubt this will supplant mice and keyboards as input devices - I’m not sure I want to be typing my e-mail by tapping on a touch screen, or aiming my rockets with touch gestures.

Still - interesting developments, worth keeping an eye on.